FFXIV Healer Strike and the 'How would you fix it?' line

[Shurrikhan]

Not as painful as someone making their own bespoke thread to whine that they're "tired" of reiterating their points...

Which *definitely* won't happen here, right fellas?

>> Please let us claim that X does not exist despite all the evidence to the contrary, since said evidence does not always appear on the same page as my post and no one could be expected to skim through the thread they comment on. If you must claim it does exist, please recopy it for us in clean, full detail independent on replied-to context each time we request it. Don't merely link a post, since those shuffle around.

<< Okay, then since this falls into just one specific approach to a given problem and can thereby deserve its own thread, I'll make a new thread and just link that instead?

>> Haaaa. Narcissists, amirite?

/sigh

__________________

Anywho...

As an increasing amount of my free time has been going towards MOBAs and hero shooters, lately, I can't help but notice how incredible some of those kits are by comparison in terms of density of available action/nuance per separate ability.

Let's take the Paladins' AST-vibe-ish support hero Ying, for instance.

Her kit is simple. Effectively...

• Filler attack
• Healing Turret
• Teleport to Healing Turret (or the location of the one most recently standing)
• Overdrive / Blow up your healing turret (as an AoE attack, customizable to instead AoE heal)
• Ultimate: Big AoE heal nuke that grants self and allies a brief moment of CC immunity

Yet, it manages to play significantly off the unique appearances granted to those skills:

• Her healing turrets are instead each a Mirror Image.
• Because they are placeable at range, she can use them to teleport over walls.
• When she "detonates" them, they seek out nearby enemies to blow themselves up for AoE damage.
• Since they have truesight, she can use them to guard against stealthed enemies, scout for enemies around corners, or finish off camped enemies.
• Once using her Ultimate, Ying can use allies as illusions in some ways, such as by being able to teleport to them as well.
• (And that's before even considering customization, such as in allowing one's illusions to heal nearby allies instead of damaging nearby enemies.)

Just by taking the basics of a turret-based healer a bit further, we end up with those 4 abilities (plus primary fire) offering some extreme leverage and some really fun min-maxing opportunities, such as from setting up ambushes (damaging Illusions) or fall-backs (healing Illusions), ability to pump damage from off-angles and teleport back, to heal-nuke one's main force via her Ultimate before diving with a flanker while the enemy team is suddenly overextended, to have her Illusions intercept damage for her, etc., etc.

Imagine what then could be done with even just a single skill more at such density, or a whole 12 skills at nearly that density. Or if the mirror images could act more like the player herself, mimicking her past movements. Imagine that being extended into a rehaul of an AST, with a small palette of skills spent towards Cards and the rest towards fate-weaving and manipulation of time, space, and/or mass (though I guess that last bit would ultimately be redundant?), perhaps using reflections of herself over time.

It makes me wonder what the PvE experience and PvP experience here could be like, both, with better netcode (so that PvP at 20ms ping here didn't feel like WoW's at 200ms) and a PvE design more open to more broadly integrated interaction instead of dividing the concerns of each role (outside of their sole nearly-uncapped output, damage) as to reduce the experience increasingly towards one of dancing around striking dummies.